


In His Image

by devilinthedetails



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: F/M, Family, Family History, Gen, History, Legacies, Portrait Gallery, artwork
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 04:54:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14253459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Shinko and Roald in the royal portrait gallery. Set during Squire.





	In His Image

In His Image

Shinko stifled a gasp when her betrothed threw open the gilded grand doors of the royal portrait gallery. She had never set foot in the royal gallery before though none would have disputed her right to do so. As the third ranking personage in Tortall by virtue of her impending marriage to Prince Roald, she was subordinate only to the king, the queen, and her future husband, all of whom had encouraged her to explore the palace. Nowhere was forbidden to her or her curiosity. Still she hadn’t ventured here. It had seemed to be trespassing on the history of a family to which she was not yet a part. 

“It’s beautiful.” Shinko stared up at the vaulted arches of the ceiling that emphasized the majesty of the portraits in their golden frames that decorated the long walls of the hall. 

“Kally and I used to come her to play when the winter snows piled in the gardens outside.” There was the reminiscent smile on Roald’s face that only Kally could provoke. Ever since she had arrived at the palace, Shinko had heard rumors that the oldest Conte princess was her betrothed’s favorite sibling. Before she had met Kalasin, she had attributed that to the whispers that Kalasin was the most beautiful of the Conte sisters—after all, what brother wouldn’t love the prettiest sister best?—but when she saw how charming Kalasin could entice Roald out of his reserved shell swifter than anyone, she had realized that Kalasin’s charisma made Roald feel alive the way a bird’s singing lightened Shinko’s soul. Roald doted on his sweet sister Lianne and indulged Vania’s willfulness, but it was Kalasin’s spirt that inspired him, Shinko had understood. Gesturing at the mahogany benches that shone from polishing which were positioned along the center of the room so visitors might admire the paintings on each wall, he added, “We would climb on those benches and leap off as far as we could. When we were little, the benches seemed higher.” 

Hearing the echo of laughing and leaping children as if the scene Roald described were enfolding in the present rather than the past, Shinko observed, soft as a brushstroke, “Everything seems higher when you’re little.” 

“Yes.” Roald’s smile took on a mischievous tinge at remembered misadventures. “Kally and I had the run of the place though our behavior perhaps wasn’t proper.” 

“Even a prince cannot be proper all the time.” Shinko’s eyes gleamed as Roald led her to a portrait of an obviously important and impressive figure she didn’t have a prayer of recognizing. Anxiety at her ignorance replaced her playfulness. In the Yamani Islands, she could have commented intelligently on the history of any dynasty that had ruled the Islands and reamed insightfully on the artistic merits of any composition, but in the Eastern Lands, her knowledge of monarchies were limited to current personages and her appreciation of Tortallan aesthetics was unrefined. 

“Roger the First.” Roald tilted his chin at the dark-haired figure on the painting’s shadowy throne. “Called the unlucky because he was slain in the battle against the tribes along the Drell.” 

“The skull beneath the throne provides a morbid touch.” Shinko chanced a comment that might make her seem as if she had an impenetrable boulder for a brain. 

“It was a morbid era where painters were expected to insert as many grim reminders of death into their work as possible.” Roald nodded. “It was a response to the first outbreak of the Sweating Sickness in Tortall that claimed half of the country’s population and killed so many in Corus that the mass graves were filled, forcing bodies to be dumped in the Olorun like sewage. That fostered an environment where anything gruesome was fashionable, but fortunately fashions change.”

Continuing to the next portrait of a distant ancestor, he went on, “Jonathan the Second, the Lion of Tortall. He founded the King’s Own to be his teeth in his perpetual struggle against the nobility but that didn’t protect him from dying when too much dreamrose was slipped into his evening wine.” 

Shinko hid an instinctual wince at the reference to assassination, but Roald was more flippant about his family history as he walked onto the following painting. “Baird the Third. They named him the Adamant though he conveniently forgot to uncover who poisoned his predecessor. He was beloved among the nobility for his penchant for conveniently forgetting things that might have been important to other kings.” 

As they progressed through the gallery, Roald would pause at certain portraits to offer a slightly snide summary of the reign of the pictured monarch. Roger the Second, according to Roald, “built the Conte Road over one made by the Old Ones and the bumps can still be felt to this day.” Roger the Third, as Roald phrased it, “ended slavery and got a civil war for his trouble.” Shinko had to conceal a grin at every dry evaluation behind her fan for she would never be so graceless as to reveal horse teeth to her husband-to-be. 

It was the commanding mint green gaze of a woman that captivated Shinko. Noticing the figured that had captured Shinko’s attention, Roald answered her unspoken question, “Queen Regent Margarry who ruled when her son Jasson the Second was in his minority. Men accused her of being unladylike because she was so bold as to enjoy leading the realm. Ironically her name is widespread among the wives and daughters of today’s conservatives. Maybe a name is perceived as traditional as long as it was used far enough in the past or perhaps some conservatives aren’t as passionate about history as they insist they are.” 

He didn’t speak at such length again until they neared the end of the gallery. Staring up into eyes that were an even solemner blue than his own, he murmured, “Roald the Fourth. He was known far and wide as the Quiet because it was said that he never smiled after he ascended to the throne but during his reign the kingdom prospered in peace.” 

“Ruling could make any man serious.” Shinko waved her fan in accompaniment to her contemplation. “The pressures and responsibilities would crush most.” 

“Not Roald the Quiet’s successor, Baird the Roisterer.” Roald’s chin jerked at a painting of a rotund monarch with florid cheeks red as the wine in the goblets clutched into each hand. If the portrait was intended as a flattering portrayal, Shinko cringed internally imagining how Baird the Roisterer had appeared in flesh and blood rather than canvas and paint. “He thought his father too serious so he banished all the pressures of ruling by ignoring its obligations and overindulging in its pleasures. When he was in his cups, he was fond of announcing to banquet halls crowded to the rafters that he would trade Corus for a keg of wine if anyone was fool enough to make the bargain.” 

“It didn’t occur to him that there were kegs of wine in Corus?” Shinko’s lips quirked. 

“Not much occurred to him when he was in his cups.” Roald’s face wore the hint of a smirk. “He didn’t, thank Mithros, trade Corus for a keg of wine, but he did allow Tusaine and Galla to encroach on our lands. His son Jasson went to war to win them back, and, when he did, he claimed extra territory as interest for the loan. That earned him the title of Conqueror.” 

“The son had to fix the mistakes of the father and correct his excesses.” Shinko would never have implied in the Yamani Islands that an emperor, ruling by the mandate of Yama, could ever stray from the path of wisdom, but in Tortall, the interpretation of history was permitted to be more forthright and less sycophantic. Monarchs were allowed to be reduced to caricatures after their deaths if their legacies were weak as watered wine. 

“In the process, he left new wrongs for his son to right and was guilty of his own excesses.” Roald’s tone was so low that Shinko had to incline her ear toward him to hear. “My grandfather, Roald the Fifth, labored throughout his lifetime to restore peace to the realm and establish amiable relations with our neighbors that Jasson the Conqueror’s sword-rattling had disrupted. That’s why he was called the Peacemaker even if he did war with Tusaine once in his reign. Both of them could never escape their father’s legacy no matter how hard they fought to free themselves.” 

“A father’s shadow can loom large.” Shinko shot Roald a sidelong glance, thinking of her betrothed’s complicated—sometimes calm and sometimes tempestuous—relationship of mingled admiration and resentment for his father. Roald longed to please his father as much as he yearned to create his own destiny and future for the country he would inherit. Fathers shaped their sons in their image no matter how their sons rebelled. To be the opposite of your father was still to be molded by your father. “Don’t you agree?” 

“I’m my father’s son but I’m not my father whether I wish to be him or not,” replied Roald after a moment’s hesitation that suggested he understood exactly what she was asking. “There is a tension and a balance in that.” 

As a Yamani, Shinko could relate to that sentiment. After all, it was the uneasy, ever-shifting tension and harmony of opposites—the wary dance between darkness and light—that kept the world in motion and defined all meaning. Nothing, in Yamani philosophy, could exist without its opposite, and everything must contains its opposite or it would crumble to dust.


End file.
